The decision by Victoria’s government to pull out of hosting the Commonwealth Games issues a broader challenge to sports leaders, governments, but also athletes and citizens around the world. This crisis goes beyond the growing indifference to the purpose of the event, originally founded as the Empire Games in 1930. The Olympics faces a similar struggle with just two bids for the 2024 Summer Games, with Paris and Los Angeles awarded 2024 and 2028 respectively, and only Brisbane bidding for 2032.
In the race for the 2022 Winter Olympics, at least five potential host cities, all western democracies, withdrew from the bidding process after voter referendums or public polling indicated a lack of local support, leaving only Beijing and Almaty in the running. The old model for hosting major events is broken and a new one is needed.
The costs of the original model are simply too high. This isn’t just about the financial costs alone any more, despite the Victoria government’s rationale and the consistently woeful history of budget overruns and poor budget management of sporting events for decades. We are now aware of other costs that matter, barely visible when these sports events were first set up.
Financial costs can no longer be calculated in isolation without reckoning the social value, environmental impact and governance of these events. Just as businesses now justify and measure their performance in the areas of ESG (environmental, social, governance) impact, so sport needs to create ways to embed these beyond PR and rhetoric. While recent hosting bids include sections on sustainability and legacy, giving a nod to the changing priorities of our world, these have been add‑ons rather than the driving force of the bid. The game to win hosting rights has been as much about pleasing the respective awarding international bodies as about providing what the citizens of the host city need. This balance clearly has to change.
Questions of social value force us to ask: who benefits from hosting these events? A litany of stories of negative experiences of local residents from Montreal to Rio de Janeiro has shown how much of an afterthought this has been. How far the London 2012 Olympics actually brought positive regeneration to east London remains hotly debated over a decade later. Qatar brought a whole new level of human cost with the atrocious conditions for the construction workers leading up to the World Cup. But it’s harder to cover up these human costs now and western audiences are using their voices to reject being part of this.
Added to this, large-scale negative environmental impacts from sport question the very future of international sporting events. Just as the music industry is considering whether mega world tours of superstars are environmentally sustainable in the future, so the sports world needs to find a way to justify the international travel and environmental destruction associated with major events. Many athletes are increasingly environmentally conscious, with the Olympic canoeing gold medallist Etienne Stott setting up and leading Champions for Earth to engage athletes in growing awareness and activism on climate issues. More and more athletes want to decrease how much they travel, as unease grows about the ethics of the environmental footprint left by sport. There needs to be a serious forum for this debate to connect athletes, governments and citizens to find better solutions.
The climate itself is already starting to play a role. With the rate of temperature increase, fewer locations are becoming viable. I found it plenty hot enough competing at the Athens Olympics in 2004, when temperatures were in the 30s – it’s hard to imagine competing at an Olympics in Athens again with temperatures regularly over 40C. The experience of Qatar with its air-conditioned stadiums at excruciating financial and environmental cost is not an attractive one to repeat.
Although there are examples of governments invested in sportswashing at any cost in order to project themselves on a global scale, with Beijing, Sochi and Qatar looming large in our memories, the urgent question is whether we can create any viable alternative? Not just massaging the old model with some good PR, but actually changing the purpose, values, experience and impact of sporting events.
The fact that citizens are speaking up could be a positive. People care about sport, it has always had the power to engage individuals and communities and create powerful moments of change. Recently in Boston and Vancouver, citizens demanded or voted that their governments pull out of the race to host the Olympics. Although this sounds a death knell to the existing approach, it could also signal an opportunity and desire to do things differently.
What would a bid look like if local citizens were part of it (not just part of a glitzy parade or token aspect), if they got to determine how it could support their communities? What if they were part of decision-making from the start? The use of open source platforms has shown how groups such as the Climate Assembly UK can be used to achieve consensus on difficult topics across the political and social spectrum. The digital space is increasingly used by regional mayors and governments, from the Better Reykjavik project to the Taiwanese government, to enable civic participation, dialogue and consensus-building.
When Birmingham stepped in to take on the 2022 Commonwealth Games, after the South African city of Durban failed to meet the Commonwealth Games Federation standards, it did so fully conscious of the responsibility and opportunity to reimagine and reinvent the event.
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Birmingham deliberately placed the Commonwealth Games within a wider sporting and cultural programme. With sports events throughout 2023 from cricket to the Harlem Globetrotters to the IBSA World Games (for blind and partially sighted athletes) and a six-month long arts festival, sports and political leaders tried to connect more deeply than with previous rotating circus-style visits. In contrast to the International Olympic Committee’s “rule 50”, competitors were allowed to use their platform publicly to highlight issues such as race, sexual orientation or social injustice.
On the field of play, the Commonwealth Games is the only major international competition that features athletes with a disability alongside able-bodied athletes. The Australian swimmer Rowan Crothers spoke out publicly after the announcement from Victoria that this is a blow to inclusion, saying: “For some athletes, a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games means more than a gold medal at the Paralympics … recognition and equality can mean more than achievement.” This has been a way in which the Commonwealth Games has sought to change the values and what it represents to offer more to those watching, taking part and hosting.
There’s no doubt that Games remain deeply important to the athletes that compete. For many sports, like netball, it is the pinnacle of their competition, and there is no doubt that many athletes are feeling disappointed reading the decision taken by Victoria’s leaders.
Multisport events are a crucial opportunity to learn on a bigger stage, for some, a milestone on the way to preparing for an Olympics, for others, the biggest event they’ll experience. Athletes need to be part of discussions around reimagining and recreating a sustainable future for sporting events.
It’s clear that outside authoritarian regimes, hosting international sporting events can no longer be imposed on local populations. We need to avoid a world where we find the Olympics and World Cups rotating around Moscow, Beijing and Dubai. Citizens need to be involved from the start, designing how any sports event complements and fits in with their economic, social and environmental vision for their city or state. We shouldn’t ask citizens simply to “back the bid” but to join in and “build the bid”.